1. Field
The present invention relates generally to offers and, more specifically, to systems for electronically tracking offers across multiple channels.
2. Description of the Related Art
Often merchants enlist third parties to promote offers, such as coupons, sales, rebates, favorable shipping terms, or other changes in terms favorable to consumers. This practice in recent years has expanded greatly in the context of the Internet. In some cases, a given offer may be distributed by thousands of publishers on the World Wide Web (or other content-publishing platforms, such as those having native applications on mobile devices) to millions of consumers. Each publisher may draw an audience based on content gathered, curated, or created by that publisher, and merchants may compensate a publisher for presenting the merchant's offers to that publisher's audience. Consequently, consumers become aware of potentially valuable offers; merchants benefit from wide distribution of their offers; and publishers are compensated for providing content valued by their audience.
Generally, merchants seek wide distribution of their offers to large numbers of publishers and consumers, in some cases according to geographic or publisher-type constraints consistent with a merchant's brand and geographic reach. But managing a large network of publishers is difficult and expensive. For instance, simply determining compensation can be challenging at large scales. Often, publishers are compensated based on revenue that is received by the merchant from visitors to the publishers website or other application, and keeping track of which publishers should be credited for which transactions can be very expensive, particularly when a merchant wishes to work with thousands of publishers potentially leading to millions of transactions. Further, selecting, communicating with, and establishing contractual relationships with thousands of publishers can be expensive, complex, and labor intensive.
Similarly, many publishers wish to work with a relatively large number of merchants in order to receive a relatively large number of offers to present to the publishers' audiences. Yet many publishers lack the resources to track, across hundreds of merchants, which offers led to compensable consumer actions or establish contractual relationships with hundreds of merchants, let alone accommodate a potentially diverse set of merchant-specific protocols and business processes for communicating information about offers.
To shield both merchants and publishers from this complexity, many on-line offers are distributed through affiliate-network systems. These computer systems act as an intermediary between publishers and merchants, distributing offers to publishers, allocating credit to publishers for revenue they generate for merchants, simplifying the process of establishing contractual relationships, and standardizing communication protocols and business processes. (Though not all affiliate-network systems necessarily fill all of these roles.) Often merchants and publishers access these computer systems through role-specific interfaces presented over the Internet, or access may be provided via a human representative of the entity operating the affiliate-network system who updates the system on behalf of merchants or publishers.
Many affiliate-network systems are ill-suited to address future trends in the distribution of offers expected by applicants. As smart phones and other mobile user devices proliferate, it is becoming increasingly viable and desirable to present and redeem offers both on-line, when the consumer is away from (or not necessarily at) the geographic location of a merchant's brick-and-mortar store, and in-store, when the consumer is physically present at a merchant's location. Further, as consumers integrate more networked devices and network-accessible accounts into their lives, many consumers wish to distribute offer discovery, offer curation, and offer redemption across multiple electronic devices and accounts, with activities through one device or account being reflected in other devices or accounts. Yet many traditional affiliate-network systems are not configured to track these activities both on-line and off-line (e.g., in-store or through a different device or account from that through which the publisher initially presented the offer). As a consequence, these traditional systems are ill-suited to properly compensate publishers, distribute offers through multiple on-line and off-line channels, or provide merchants and publishers with analytics and controls spanning multiple channels.